Trump’s White House Ballroom Defense Unravels as Secret Bunker Exposed

President Trump may have undermined his own legal argument to build a new White House ballroom.

Trump is claiming that ballroom is necessary because it will also provide a secure underground facility in case of a national emergency, an argument his lawyers have used in court. But former White House officials told The Washington Post that the building already has a fortified bunker deep underground that was built more than a decade ago to shelter the president and White House staffers.

The facility, located over 60 feet underneath the White House, was secretly built during the Obama administration and can house dozens of people for multiple weeks, the officials told the Post. It can withstand a nuclear bomb and was designed to give the president a secure command center if such a disastrous scenario takes place.

Trump and his lawyers have argued in court that the White House ballroom is necessary for national security because secure underground facilities are part of the plans. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle repeated those arguments when contacted by the Post.

“The East Wing Modernization Project is inextricably tied to the security of the President, the White House grounds and the certain security infrastructure assets,” Ingle said in a statement. “Recent events such as the foiled attack on the historic UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House proves exactly why the East Wing Modernization Project is severely needed for large scale events, which include drone proof structures and drone ports among other critical security enhancements.”

Last week, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts stayed a lower court ruling and allowed the Trump administration to continue construction on the ballroom while the high court considers the White House’s arguments. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had ruled that the ballroom was illegal because Trump didn’t have congressional approval.

Administration officials such as White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller have used national security arguments to defend the ballroom. Miller wrote in a court filing that the construction “serves continuity-of-government interests by ensuring that the President and senior national security staff are able to operate from a protected facility during any attack on the nation’s capital.”

In an August 13 filing to the Supreme Court, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll wrote, “Securing this reinforced subterranean node guarantees uninterrupted command and control in place.”

The White House ballroom and underground facilities are “a nondiscretionary prerequisite to ensure the President can maintain continuity of government, uninterrupted operations, and effectively exercise National Command Authority during an attack or global crisis,” Driscoll wrote.

But the Post’s report shows that all of those arguments don’t hold up when there’s already a secure, underground bunker at the White House that is just over a decade old. Trump is expending government resources to defend a vanity project that has no real justification besides his own love of luxury buildings.

A private arbitrator has ordered The Washington Post to rehire opinion columnist Karen Attiah—who was fired from the paper last September after she criticized gun violence and posted a racist quote from right-wing activist Charlie Kirk after his death.  

“After the Washington Post fired me last year for speaking the truth in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing, I fought back. And I’m happy to announce: I won my case against the Washington Post,” Attiah—the Post’s only Black opinion columnist at the time of her firing—wrote Monday on Bluesky. “They have been ordered to reinstate me immediately.”

“This decision confirms what we’ve said from the start: I was doing my job as an opinion writer, and this was wrongful termination,” she said in another statement. 

An independent arbitrator found the Post “violated” its labor agreement and “did not have good and sufficient cause” to fire Attiah, according to a copy of the order reviewed by The New York Times.

Attiah made a string of posts on Bluesky in the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting in Utah, which followed a school shooting in Colorado, with only one of her posts actually mentioning Kirk by name. 

“I wish I had hope for gun control and that I could believe ‘political violence has no place in this country.’ But we live in a country that accepts white children being massacred by gun violence,” she wrote first. “Not just accepts, but worships violence.”

“Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence,” she then wrote, referring to Kirk, who spent much of his career trying to justify racism and bigotry. “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” she said later.

The one post Attiah made that actually had Kirk’s name in it was a slightly paraphrased quote. 

“‘Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot’—Charlie Kirk,” she wrote. (Kirk’s original quote was “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously,” in reference to former First Lady Michelle Obama, news host Joy Reid, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and former Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, although his ire was certainly directed at any successful Black woman.) 

Attiah said the Post found her Bluesky posts to be “unacceptable,” “gross misconduct,” and “endangering the physical safety” of her co-workers. She added that she was fired “without conversation,” and called it a “violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.” The arbitrator felt similarly, and the decision to reinstate Attiah was widely celebrated. 

“Journalists can’t work at an organization where they must live in fear of being arbitrarily fired for doing their jobs—which, in Karen’s case, was writing her opinion,” Washington Post Guild Chair Natalie Vineberg wrote in a statement. “This decision is a victory for all Guild members who benefit from and fought for the just cause protections in our contract, and a tribute to every Guild member who took action in solidarity with Karen.”

The Justice Department appears to have hired a convicted election hacker to monitor elections.

Democracy Docket reported that David Michael Levin appears to have joined the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. A Florida attorney, Levin in 2016 was charged with three felonies for hacking a Florida state elections website as well as a county elections website. The hacking had no impact on the vote counting or outcome, but Levin pleaded guilty to the crimes.

Levin argued he just wanted to check in on “the integrity of elections.” He went to jail for 20 days and did two years of probation.

Democracy Docket reported that he was recently involved in a Minnesota election operation alongside William F. Mohrman, a senior counsel in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and the attorney who represented Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd. The Justice Department has not confirmed Levin’s hiring or his role in the operation.

The Trump administration has made a habit of offering vindication for people who flat-out violated election laws in an attempt to stop what they believe was fraud—a lie their president has constantly tried to manifest into existence. Colorado’s Tina Peters, the former Colorado county election clerk found guilty of tampering with voting machines, was hosted at the White House last month. And more broadly, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has changed the purpose and function of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division entirely.

The apparent hiring of Levin—a hacker watching over elections—may also be a prelude for the midterms, as the DOJ has already announced plans to send 1,000 poll monitors to ballot boxes around the country during the midterms.

The Supreme Court is letting President Trump move forward with his expensive White House ballroom.

On Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts ordered a stay in the preliminary injunction issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that would have halted work at 11:59 p.m. This means that for now, construction can resume while the high court gives a full review to the lower court’s ruling earlier this month that the ballroom is illegal due to a lack of congressional approval.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled 2–1 on August 7 that Congress has the “exclusive authority to regulate the construction and demolition of White House structures,” and since Trump began construction on his ballroom without congressional approval, it was against the law.

“At this preliminary stage, the National Trust [for Historic Preservation] has shown, compellingly, that Congress has not ceded unfettered authority to the Executive Branch to dramatically redesign, reshape, and reconstruct the White House—the People’s House—to fit a particular President’s desires,” the ruling stated.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation initiated the legal challenge against Trump’s ballroom, on the grounds that he doesn’t have the authority for its construction, which has resulted in the demolition of the White House’s East Wing. The organization’s lawyers say that Trump is trying to “outrun the courts” by speeding up construction without waiting for judicial rulings.

Last year, Trump vowed that the ballroom “won’t interfere with the current building,” a promise that was quickly broken when the public saw pictures of the gutted White House. He claimed that it would only cost $200 million, only for that number to soar to $300 million and then $400 million after he added extra construction. Later, it emerged that taxpayers would be footing half of the bill for a $600 million project.

For now, Trump gets to keep building his unnecessary ballroom, and by the time the Supreme Court issues a final ruling, the American people could be stuck with it, whether it’s legal or not.

This story has been updated.

President Trump is trying to sue for defamation after yet another report found that the National Guard takeover of cities across America had no significant impact on violent crime levels.

In July, the Center for American Progress, or CAP, published a study analyzing the impact of Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles, Memphis, and Washington, D.C., which he has claimed time and time again saved those cities. In reality, the report found that the effort cost $1.7 billion and did virtually nothing.

“The findings of this analysis confirm what many already suspected: At the time of the administration’s federal law enforcement and National Guard deployments, the primary goal was never to stop crime,” the report noted. “There is no compelling evidence that these deployments reduced homicides, violent crime, or gun violence.”

That scathing finding led Trump to threaten another defamation lawsuit, arguing that the report was false and malicious. Trump’s personal lawyer, Alejandro Brito, contacted CAP on Monday with the lawsuit threat, giving the liberal think tank until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract the study and say sorry to Trump, The New York Times reported.

“The report is just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics, including George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, WellsFargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, and NBC Universal. Foreign support includes the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (Taiwan), and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates,” Trump ranted earlier this month. “The Dumocrats love it, and are against anything ‘TRUMP.’ These people, and others like them, are so bad for our Country. Their stated course is anything to hate or demean ‘TRUMP.’ This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now.”

CAP President Neera Tanden called Trump’s allegations “baseless” and vowed to fight back.

“Silencing research that is inconvenient to government policy is anathema to free speech and the First Amendment,” she wrote on X. “CAP will neither cower nor bend to this attack on independent research.”

This all of course means that American taxpayers paid billions of dollars for the National Guard to loiter in the streets of blue cities—in metro stops, in beautiful public parks, by Trader Joe’s—for nothing.

This story has been updated.